TENACIOUS: Guy Who Watches ESPN During Class Still Showing Up In-Person

BLOOMINGTON – In the wake of a global pandemic, many universities
have shuttered their windows and have moved their curricula online. Many
students are handling the transition well, and many are struggling to
keep their heads afloat amid the uncertainty of the future. However, one
IUB student, Brett Henderson, is still making his mark on campus.

Brett is what his more attentive colleagues in the past have called a
“Schrodinger’s Student.” He shows up to class on a daily basis, but has
never been seen actively taking notes, participating in class
discussions, or even looking up once from whichever ESPN stream he’s
tuned to at the time. To everyone else, it looks like he (or, more
likely, his parents) have set down thousands of dollars for a change of
background noise to his sports viewership. To onlookers, he is at once a
student by virtue of being in a classroom, and yet not a student, as
all other signs point to the contrary.

However, while all those fucking nerds are struggling to keep a solid
GPA because they’re too stubborn and egotistical to just take an S/F
for the semester, Brett has defied all expectations and outperformed
even his most studious classmates by continuing to show up to classes
in-person, despite nobody being there.

It seems that the perceived weakness of having no situational
awareness whatsoever was the perfect adaptation to a total-shutdown
scenario; while many students sit at home, cowering in apprehension of a
future of any kind, Brett sits in class, continuing to watch streams.
Sometimes, he’ll pop out an earbud, lean to his left and, without
breaking eye contact with his laptop screen, ask “Hey, we don’t have a
quiz today, do we?” and, when met with silence, responds “Alright,
cool,” and pops his earbud back in.

If one were to look at the oblivious way he sits in class as if
there’s another living soul in the building, they would see a living
time capsule into the long-forgotten age of About A Month & A Half
Ago. By continuing to live his life as he always has, he succeeds in
reminding us all of our lost sense of normalcy in these precarious
times. And for that, collectively, we all say: Fuck you, Brett. Fuck.
You.